


Night Driving

by too_much_in_the_sun



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1980s, Horror, M/M, Mad Scientists, Nuclear Winter, Post-Nuclear War, Road Trip, Science Fiction, The Desert, Unreliable Narrator, excessive amounts of information about filoviridae and nuclear weapons, the shrugging emoji
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2018-08-29 04:14:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8474941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/too_much_in_the_sun/pseuds/too_much_in_the_sun
Summary: In spring 1988, nuclear war finally came to America.        
   
      
   
  The atmosphere outside my head was the same to me as the one inside it. Everything had ground to a stop. There was only decay.
   
        
[edited 6 May 2018]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's way easier to ask people for their opinions on this if I put it here, as opposed to sending people a PDF every day.
> 
> This is the latest draft of something that's been in the works since 2013, but no prior knowledge is required. (If you would like to know more, I have a [development blog](http://decaynovel.tumblr.com) and a [website](https://decay-novel.neocities.org/) for this project.)
> 
> I haven't written fiction since 2015, so rustiness in the style is unintentional.
> 
> There's no archive tickbox to indicate "wacky medical details", "rusty writing skills", or "excessive ratio of Suffering to Things Happening", but all those happen here.
> 
> No guarantees on when/if updates happen.
> 
> Thanks to Maddie for enabling me in writing this tale of suffering desert gays.

You see, the problem is that I'm losing my mind.

That's not quite right. I'm _afraid_ that I'm losing my mind.

Or that maybe I already have, and this has all been one big delusion.

It started with the dreams. At first it was just one dream.

I was driving, late at night. Trying to get home before something terrible happened.

The road was familiar, but it was slick with rain. It was detoured for construction. It was snowing so thickly I could see only balls of yellow light in a storm of white static. It was clogged with other drivers, hurrying madly under a black and starless sky. It was empty except for me and the thin light of my headlights, the faint glow of the speedometer.

I drove as fast as I could.

I was on the road to my parent's split-level back home, surrounded by the deep second-growth forest. I was going to my first apartment, along a deserted rural highway in the high plains. I was trying to get to my grandparents' house in the northern woods. I was coming home from a late night at the lab, passing empty swaths of desert lit only by a half moon.

I was outrunning the ball of fire.

Someone was following me. Some _thing_ was following me. I could not see it. I could see its shadow. I saw it curled in the passenger seat and in the rearview mirror, laying in the backseat like a corpse beneath a shroud.

No matter how long I drove, I never got where I was going. I always woke first. They weren't nightmares, exactly -- I never woke screaming as I sometimes did from other dreams -- but I woke with a pounding, heavy pulse. It took a long time to remember where I was, and when. Who I was.

A lot of people have recurring dreams, and most of them quite sane.

What made these dreams different was that I still had my hand.

I held my cigarette in the first two fingers as I cruised past patches of sage and stretches of empty earth. I used it for my turn signal and to adjust the air conditioning. To drive while I tuned the radio. I scratched at my right shoulder and ran my fingers through my hair. I drummed my fingers on the wheel. All things that normal people do when driving. And, I suppose, in their dreams.

I saw my copper bracelet glinting on its wrist. The one with strange and intricate engravings in a Southwestern style. The one Kyle bought me for our first Christmas, that I wore during the whole long drive through the mountains to California, and left a green ring around my wrist for days. The one that I am sure is still in its drawer in my apartment, if the building still stands.

The bracelet I haven't worn in months, and can't wear anymore.

A hand and a bracelet don't make a dream a nightmare. Neither does driving, for that matter. It was the _feeling_ I got from the dream, the tense feeling of pursuit and of a clock ticking down to disaster. In the dream I always felt drugged, as if there were a layer of thin glass between me and the world. As if something were just about to happen.

It was always worst in the middle of the night, when the pain would wake me up. I would lie there half-awake, feeling sharp pinpricks in the fingers of my left hand, convinced that if I looked over, it would still be there.

When I started having the dreams, I was still in the hospital. They've evolved over time. Grown longer, though time in all bad dreams stretches out like awful taffy. I have them more often. Most of the dreams I remember now are this one. And they worry me more.

At first I blamed them on the drugs they had me on, and the stress. No one, I am sure, sleeps very well in hospitals. When I mentioned the first dream to my day nurse, she told me about the same thing, and said that if my dreams really distressed me, she could see with the doctor about changing my medication.

Later, I blamed the dreams on more or less the same thing the nurse had. On the arm, and on different aspects of my long recovery. Partially, at least, it was true. The pain, and the medications I took for it, made waking life strange, as if I were seeing the world through a distorted pane of glass. My dreams, when I remembered them, were dark, and felt more real than my real life.

As the dreams repeated, I came to think of them by names. I've told you about the driving dream, but the one that most disturbed me was the dream of the accident.

 


	2. Chapter 2

I don't remember losing my hand. That, in itself, makes sense, since for the actual amputation I was anesthetized, deep in a drugged sleep. 

What bothers me is that I don't remember the time I spent in the hospital before the amputation. I've seen the paperwork I signed, and it's my handwriting. But I remember none of it. A week of my life is almost completely gone, erased from my memory.

Like it never happened.

I know what I've been told about what happened. My accident generated an amazing amount of paperwork in the weeks before the war. Being on medical leave gave me more than enough time to comb through the portions of it I had the clearance for. I heard some of the testimony from the people themselves. My dead friends.

After I was discharged from the hospital, Jim told me himself what he saw on the day of the accident. It was more or less what he had written down. I'm starting to forget what his face looked like. I think he was sad. I remember him sounding sad.

He came to my apartment and told me what he knew.

Jim and I had worked in the same lab at the facility, and I considered him a friend. When I came in that day, he thought that I looked a little sick -- hungover, maybe, since it was a Monday. 

He didn't see it happen, per se. I was the only one who did, and the last thing I remember from that day is that although it was a morning in January, it was already warm, and I left my jacket in the backseat of my car.

We were working with animal test subjects that day. Mice. It was a needlestick injury -- I was injecting one of the mice with the virus, and my hand must have slipped. Jim was my supervisor, and I immediately reported my injury to him. There was no need to check whether my glove had been compromised. He could see the blood oozing from the site.

Security, and Jim, escorted me to the on-site isolation unit, where I stayed for the next three days. Our test chimps generally didn't show symptoms until 120 hours after exposure, but I almost halved our record time.

The stick was on the index finger of my left hand, in the meaty part near where it connects to the palm. For the first day I was in isolation, it healed relatively normally. I complained that my hands and joints ached. A bruise developed. They gave me Tylenol. Jim told me not to worry, and that I would be out in no time.

On the morning of the third day, two things happened. Jim brought me news that the guinea pigs which had been exposed to my blood and breathing my air had failed to contract the virus. I was officially determined to not be contagious.

The first time I vomited blood was just after Jim visited. If he was telling the truth, it was while he was there, and he was the one who called for help. 

Following that I was transferred to the nearest hospital, where I was again put in isolation. 

Sometimes when I dream I'm back in the lab, on that day. I'm not in my body. I see myself in third person. I can't do anything to keep it from happening. 

Sometimes the dream will change and I'll be in isolation, one of my friends facing me through the glass. Jim is talking to me, telling me that they'll have me out before the end of the day, that he's going to buy me a beer to make up for all this. Kyle is visiting, his hand pressed against the glass opposite mine. He's talking about what we'll do when I get out. It feels like everyone I know comes to visit, to get a look.

I remember what the isolation unit looked like from the outside, and sometimes I think I almost remember what it was like in there. But I think my memory is playing more tricks on me, and that I'm just remembering the hospital. The institutional bareness of the room. The smell of a thousand cleaning agents. 

When I was discharged, Jim told me that I was the only person in the history of the facility to actually get sick while in the isolation unit. Everyone else had turned out clean. I was just unlucky. 

They amputated my hand four days after I was admitted to the hospital. I was lucid enough to sign the paperwork for the surgery.

Jim visited me three times in those four days. The report on my accident wasn't done when the war started, but I've seen the photos he took of my hand. 

It doesn't look like a human hand anymore. It looks like I'm wearing a black glove. The original wound had grown and was hot with infection. My skin was rotting away. Jim says it smelled sweet.

The surgeon predicted that the amputation would at most give me enough time for my family to fly out and put my affairs in order. To say their goodbyes. 

It was very nice of him, but the specifics of my condition were classified. My family didn't know I had even been injured until after I left the hospital and was recovering at home. Kyle made the phone call. I was probably asleep.

My living will stated that, if I were terminally ill, my doctors were permitted to use experimental treatments. Given that I was the first human "test subject" for this particular strain of virus, all of my treatment was experimental.

For a while after the amputation, I drifted in a morphine haze as they pumped me full of antivirals, steroids, and antibiotics. I remember it as a dreamless sleep, interrupted by brief, blurry snatches of consciousness. Faces in surgical masks drifted above me. I was almost always cold. Outside my window the weather was clear, the sky a deep and cloudless blue.

The first time I was conscious long enough to remember it any better than that was the 22nd, eleven days after the accident and eight days after my first symptoms. 

I swam up out of a grey doze. My left hand itched worse than it ever had before, and when I went to scratch it, it was gone. My fingers found only a dressing folded loosely over where my arm now ended, midway between my elbow and where the wrist had been. I was trying to get my fingers under the dressing, to get rid of that itch, when the morning nurse walked in.

"You're awake," she said. "Are you feeling better?"

My throat hurt when I tried to speak, and my voice came out in a weak, hoarse whisper. "What happened to me?"

She came closer to my bed, and I saw that above her mask she had dark green eyes. There was a small mole on the left side of her forehead. "You've had a terrible accident," she said, and moved my right hand to rest at my side. She wasn't wearing gloves, and her skin was cool and dry. "I'll have the doctor come in and talk to you."

I fell asleep before he came.

The nurse shook me awake, and when I opened my eyes the light in the room had changed, darkening towards sunset. My left arm ached all the way to the bone, and the whole hand prickled with pain. 

The doctor was standing beside my bed, his eyes impassive above the mask. His voice was slightly muffled. "I expect you have a lot of questions, Mister Porter. I'll try and answer them for you. But first, a few tests."

He asked my name, my date of birth, what year it was. Who the president was. And what was the last thing I remembered. 

"Going to work," I told him. "Monday the 11th. What happened to me?"

"You've had a terrible accident," he said. The nurse put a hand on my shoulder, in a gesture that she probably meant to be comforting. "We had to amputate your hand, but you're healing well from your infection."

"What infection?" I said. 

"Are you sure you don't remember anything after the 11th?" the nurse said helpfully. "We talked just this morning."

"No," I said. "Nothing."

"Well, it's still January, so you haven't missed too much. But I'm afraid that today is the 22nd." The doctor patted me on the shoulder. 

"Let me reintroduce myself. My name is Isaiah Fisher. I'm an infectious disease specialist here. I've been monitoring you since you were first transferred -- that was the 14th," he clarified. 

"And this is your daytime nurse, Sandra Jones. If you're still awake when she goes off shift, you'll be meeting Betty Davis -- no relation -- your night-time nurse." He didn't take off the mask, but I guessed from the crinkling of the lines around his eyes that he was smiling.

"You're recovering from a nasty case of Ebola, Mr. Porter. You're not quite out of the woods yet, but you're on the mend. I'm told you work as a research virologist?"

"Yes."

He nodded. "Thought so. The amputation was necessitated by a superinfection in the original wound on your finger. Cultures haven't come back yet, but we have cause to think the bacterium was relatively benign. Just opportunistic."

Doctor Fisher didn't stay long before leaving to see his other patients, but Sandra stayed behind. It was from her that I got the first hint of what my accident had involved. She was recording my blood pressure in my chart. (I saw that it was unusually low, but she commented that it was better than it had been.)

"Doctor Fisher says you're part of a very exclusive club now," she said by way of conversation. I was still half-asleep, and she glanced up at me from the chart before continuing. "You're one of less than fifty people in the world to survive infection with what he calls a filovirus."

That was the first piece of the puzzle. There was only one place I could have contracted a filovirus -- and that was my own lab.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a reminder that while there's some medical details mixed in, 95% of this i completely made up
> 
> it's only gonna get worse on the explicit medical details front, we haven't even gotten to the part where i start spontaneously lecturing about nuclear weapons 
> 
> what the fuck this was supposed to be Suffering, not backstory o' clock
> 
> edit: fixed a super minor continuity error

Once I was recovering at home, as I've said, Jim explained over a series of visits what had happened to me. The piece of information I've left out until now is about who I used to be.

In my former life, before the accident, I was a research virologist working in a classified Army medical research facility near Ridgecrest, California. (If you're familiar with it, that's near the Naval Weapons Center at China Lake. Our facility was administered by the brass there, though we were located off-site, deeper in the desert.)

I was part of a team dedicated to weaponizing a particular strain of the Ebola virus that had been created in-house, through the genetic engineering of certain traits of the smallpox virus into a sample of the Zaire Ebola virus. Its temporary codename was "Kinshasa", the nearest large city to where the original Ebola sample had been taken.

Jim was my team leader and supervisor. Since I was becoming less and less lucid by the time important decisions had to be made, the responsibility often passed to him. He was the one who convinced the higher-ups that it would be best if I were transferred to a civilian hospital.

He argued that the specific details of the virus need not be communicated to the civilian medical personnel there, proposing that they only need be told that it was an Ebola variant I had acquired in a lab accident. That eliminated the need for the medical personnel involved in my treatment to possess the appropriate security clearance for my work. This meant I could be treated off-site by a wider range of physicians, and receive overall better care.

I didn't have the chance to look over my medical records before the war, so I can only tell you what Jim told me, and what I saw and heard for myself.

I was discharged from the hospital on the 16th of February, and Jim came to visit me for the first time two days after that. We sat in my living room, and he recounted what had happened in the eleven days I had lost.

He started with the symptoms I had reported, which served a double purpose: first, to tell me what I had experienced but could not remember; and second, to allow the both of us to evaluate my experience as the first human victim of our virus. And what that experience indicated about codename Kinshasa's actual utility as a weapon of war -- that prognosis, at least, was relatively good.

"At first you complained mostly of a headache and muscle pain," he told me. "Flu-like symptoms. Normal for Ebola, normal for smallpox."

"Keep people from getting suspicious," I murmured. Many illnesses begin with flu-like symptoms, and most people regard those symptoms as innocuous. Hopefully, that would lead them to blow off Kinshasa as just the common cold until it was too late.

"Exactly. The rash started coming in on the 14th. I was arguing for you to be transferred to Ridgecrest Community before that, but when you started puking up blood, that about sealed the deal."

I was a little touched to hear that before it was even completely certain that I had come down with Kinshasa, he was taking a proactive role in supporting me and furthering my treatment. Jim was known for being paternal towards the more junior scientists in his lab, and in this case I appreciated that rather than finding it confining.

He was a good supervisor, and a good friend. I miss him.

I miss all of them. The day Jim visited me at home for the first time was one of my last good days before the war. My memory of it is fading -- but I still remember sitting in my living room, lit by the faint gold glow of the late-winter sun, and being free from pain. I was happy.

After my admission to the hospital, I began to develop hemorrhagic symptoms on top of the general malaise. The rash on my left hand began to darken towards black -- a color characteristic of hemorrhagic smallpox -- and slowly creep over the entire hand and up past my wrist. A smallpox-like rash began to appear on my right hand, but never acquired the deep black color or foul smell of the injury to my left hand.

I bled mildly but continuously from the sites of blood draws and the IV access. I had nosebleeds twice or three times a day, and lone drips of blood intermittently. My gums bled. Unsurprisingly, my blood pressure fell. My appetite was very low, and I slept almost all the time.

"I visited you every day between the 14th and the 17th," Jim told me, and smiled. "Partly because I was concerned about your condition, and partly out of professional curiosity."

"Makes sense." I kept a Southwestern-patterned blanket folded over the back of my couch, and had wrapped myself up in it. Jim had commented that he didn't understand how I could do such a thing without overheating.

"On the 17th," he continued, "your team of doctors and I conferred and determined that amputation would be worth the risk, given the rapid worsening of the rash and its continuing to spread up the arm. Fisher had the day nurse wake you up -- Samantha? Sandy? I can't remember her name -- and you seemed to understand all the paperwork well enough to sign that you consented to surgical treatment, including debridement of the wound." He shrugged. "Of course, given that you don't remember it, there's no way to know why exactly you said yes."

"Having one arm beats being dead by a long shot."

"Well, yeah, there's that. Could be worse, though," he said dryly, "you could always be dead with one arm." He laughed at his own joke, and I couldn't help but smile a little.

His expression went serious again, and he drummed his fingertips on the end table by his chair. "Fisher and I were also interested in seeing if the amputation would  _work_ to stop that rash from spreading. Luckily for you, we were right -- it hasn't come back, has it?" he said, with an expression of exaggerated concern.

"Very funny," I said. "No. The scars on my right hand are healing pretty well, thanks for asking."

"Oh, you're welcome." He shifted in his chair and leaned a little closer to me, as if to impart confidential information. "Your condition was  _extremely_ classified until the end of February came and we were pretty sure you were going to live. I did leak a couple details, though."

I sighed and clumsily drew the blanket around my shoulders. "Did you finally make good on that threat to go to the  _National Enquirer_ ?"

"Well, no. I told Kyle that you were in the hospital, and that your prognosis wasn't exactly fantastic. I hope that was all right to tell him -- from his point of view you just vanished and didn't come back. He was very worried about you. I didn't tell him anything above his pay grade." 

He looked me in the eyes for a moment. "You know, if you kids ever need any -- support, I guess -- you can always talk to me. I know what it's like. It's been a while, but I was your age once."

I had to think for a moment to phrase what I wanted to say. "Thanks, Jim," I said. "I appreciate that. Sometimes I get lonely and start feeling like I'm the only one."

He patted my knee through the blanket. "I know what that's like, believe me. It's a difficult time to be a homosexual, son, with this HIV stuff going around, making people think we're all perverts and Typhoid Marys. I'm here for you if you need me."

"Only if you promise not to lecture me about how things were back in your day  _too_ often," I said, and gave him a quick smile, which he returned.

"I'll do my best," he said. "Actually, how are you and Kyle getting along these days? I pulled him into my office to give him the news, and I didn't dare ask any questions I wouldn't want overheard. But this must be tough for the two of you."

"Actually," I said, clutching a wad of blanket in my hand, "we kind of split back in January. He said he needed some time to himself before we could get back together."

"Mm. Shame." Jim clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "You two get along so well, too. I'll be rooting for you to get your boy back."

"I don't know if he  _wants_ to right now, or in the future for that matter." I let go of the blanket and gently massaged the new scar on my stump with the tips of my fingers. "Maybe if I was healthy, but I don't think he'd want to be involved with -- all this."

"Oh, he's more accepting than you think he is, Beau, by a long shot. I'm not blind. He's over the moon for you. But if I were you I wouldn't go chasing after him right away. Give him some time to adjust and he might well come back on his own." He shrugged. "But who knows?"

He sipped from his glass of water, and resumed telling me about my time in the hospital.

"The brass wanted my accident report ASAP. Fisher told me the amputation might well be a complicated procedure, and you probably wouldn't want visitors right after, so I stayed at the lab and started the write-up."

"Do you think they're going to dissolve the project?" I asked. He looked slightly confused, and I added, "Your bosses. Are they going to reassign us to different projects?"

"No, no, not at all." He laughed darkly. "Actually, they were a little excited when your results came back positive for virus. The ghouls. And they're the ones who refuse to let us do primate tests."

Over the next few days, I had improved very slowly -- my fever went down, and my blood pressure began to return to normal. I slept most of the first two days after the amputation.

"You were still having abnormal bleeding, but not as intensely as before the surgery. It was starting to look as if you might make it after all. And of course, you remember things after the 22nd."

"Yeah. I do."

He shrugged. "I've been asking around off the record, and everyone I've asked has a different opinion on what could cause this kind of amnesia. Do you want to know the most common one?"

"Sure."

" 'The hell if I know'," he said with a perfectly straight face, and I couldn't help but laugh.

After I regained my composure, he went on in a more serious way.

"Really, Beau. I can't get a straight answer out of anybody. If we had the opportunity to start moving our tests into primates, maybe we'd have a better idea of the possible neurological sequelae. But you got sick before we got the chance, so it's all guesswork."

"That's not exactly what I was hoping to hear."

"Yeah, well, what can you do?" He ran a hand through his hair. "We've been pretty lucky so far with you. When you started having hemorrhagic symptoms, people started to write you off as a lost cause since that's such a grave sign. But it's looking like you pulled through."

"Lucky me," I muttered. "I thought you said almost everything was classified?"

"The details were, yes. I saw it happen, but other than the brass and me, there were only two people who had to be let in on the secret. One was the nurse keeping an eye on you while you were in the isolation tank."

"Who was the other one?" He evaded my gaze. "Oh, _no_ , you didn't--"

He cut me off before I could finish the sentence.

"Kyle," he admitted. "I told Kyle a couple things so he wouldn't worry as much. I didn't leak any details, but I told him that you'd had your hand amputated."

"You better hope he keeps his mouth shut," I grumbled. "If he spills to anyone else, it's our jobs on the line."

"Beau, I really didn't give him _any_ classified information. Just that you were sick, not what you had specifically. For all he knows, you had necrotizing fasciitis or something."

"Fine," I said, "but if you get one or both of us fired, I'll know who to blame."

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here we go, here's some Suffering

Jim came to visit me frequently while I was recovering at home. I appreciated the company -- I never admitted it to him, but the isolation and monotony deeply depressed me. I wondered if I was ever going to get better, or if every day for the rest of my life would be like this: tired, alone, and in pain.

I spent a lot of time sleeping or puttering around the apartment. I left only when I had to, which was usually for appointments with one of my team of doctors, or for groceries.

The dreams began while I was still in the hospital. At first I was too doped-up to really dream, and I only caught brief snippets of what would later become a serious preoccupation on the part of my subconscious mind. But as I began to come out of the fog, my ability to dream at length returned.

In the days after my awakening, I began to develop a peculiar kind of sixth sense that soon took over my power to wake up. I didn't wake when the pain in my arm became too much to bear. I woke when it was beginning to pass the point of no return, becoming too intense for me to sleep through.

I remember laying in my bed -- whether at home or in the hospital, it all blends together in that sleepless no man's land before dawn. Into an endlessly gray, hatefully wakeful haze.

I felt like a shell of a man. Generally speaking I still do, but it's always at its worst when I find myself unable to sleep. Like I was nothing but a thin, brittle shell containing a mass of empty blackness, and that I would crack at the slightest movement, at the shallowest breath.

Here is a secret I was never told, and that none of my doctors let me in on. None of the nurses mentioned it, though I saw a few of them holding their tongues.

The truth is, you never really get used to chronic pain. You become accustomed to its being there, so much so that its temporary absence at first feels like a terrible defect. But its nature is infinitely changeable, forever in flux. When you think you're beginning to understand the particular shape and nature of the pain at one moment, it slips away from you and changes form. The torment waxes and wanes but never really leaves you. You just learn to seek what escape you can.

For some weeks, these periods of awful wakefulness were a long countdown until I could take my pain medication. As I was permitted to return to more and more of my daily activities, I learned or remembered various strategies for forcing the time to pass while I sat or lay, unable to sleep.

Inevitably, I began to dream when I was awake.

My therapist called these waking dreams  _intrusive thoughts_ . 

They weren't thoughts so much as images. Sensations. False memories. I would find myself suddenly interrupted by a chill on the fingers of my left hand, as if I had plunged it into cold water. I would smell sagebrush and desert heat. Remember being taught to shoot a rifle by my great-grandfather, who had died before I was born. Feel a wet tongue licking my missing hand, or soft fur brushing against its wrist.

What the doctors eventually determined, what Jim and I already suspected, was that I was experiencing neurological sequelae from Kinshasa. Project Blue was showing its long-term effectiveness in disabling its surviving victims.

In plain English, I was being haunted by the damage that Kinshasa had done to my nervous system. As my brain tried to heal, scarring and chemical imbalances produced glitches in my conscious experience. My ability to perceive and understand my environment had been commandeered by hostile forces.

Most of these waking dreams were thankfully brief. Little flashes of imagery that lasted a second or two at most. The phantom sensations in my left hand were more intense and lasted longer. They've grown a little less overpowering with time, but they're becoming almost constant as the weeks go on.

My mental health was tenuous at best, and I often found myself drifting through the motions of my life, coming back to full awareness without knowing exactly how I had gotten there. I'd be in the middle of making a sandwich. Taking a shower. Watching television, and the movie would become the evening news. Lying in bed, and the clock on my dresser would flip from 1:30 am to 3:55.

Once I was cleared to return to some aspects of daily life, I was sent to mandatory psychiatric counseling before I could return from medical leave in full. After two weeks of daily sessions, he found me sane enough to go back to the lab, especially in light of growing international tensions. He tried to comfort me by saying he really thought I was ready and wasn't just rubber-stamping me because I was useful. He told me about other patients he'd treated under similar circumstances, who he had recommended remain on leave, and told me I was coping much better than any of them were, but I started to wonder.

If what I was becoming was being deemed safe for return to work, safe enough to be trusted with handling a potentially deadly virus, it could only be because the brass were getting ready to deploy it. I had led the team that helped create potential usage scenarios for a potential virus, as part of our proposal for the project that would eventually produce Kinshasa.

Jim had refused to contribute any ideas for usage on civilians. I had seen it as a harmless thought exercise, and outlined a number of potential usage cases.

After a while, I began to think I might be dead. That I had died in the hospital, and now I was being punished for my actions in life. I was never sure whether or not I could hope for redemption. One day I believed I was here to suffer into eternity. The next day I believed that once I had survived enough anguish, I would be allowed access to Heaven. Or at least granted the mercy of nonexistence.

Sometimes I could even believe I was still alive.

The evidence suggests to me that this is the real world, or at least a decent facsimile of it. If it's a facsimile, the copies of people I used to know are exquisite in their detail. Maybe they're real, and they're being punished along with me. If they're fake, they're the perfect tools for extracting my pain. The fact that only some of them are here makes them much more effective.

I think I might be in Hell.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have another full chapter written which will be posted shortly; said chapter will have an alternate edit, which I will post as additional content on my blog somewhere eventually. 
> 
> This chapter and that chapter are part of the same long scene, which should take another couple chapters after that to resolve, and will hopefully bring us out of the backstory part of this horrible thing. This chapter and the next chapter were supposed to be the _same_ chapter, but I got derailed into an extraordinarily long sub-scene and decided to divide it because as it stands, this chapter is 4000 words and 9 manuscript pages.
> 
> Which is to say a couple things:
> 
> 1\. Chapter 6 is in the horrible process of being "workshopped" for a class I'm taking; this process will eventually produce a version of the chapter designed to stand on its own.
> 
> 2\. Ha ha ha get in nerds we're finally building up to my incompetent descriptions of nuclear war.
> 
> Please enjoy, and also do you remember when I tagged this as horror because I sure do
> 
> edit: I forgot but this also contains some vintage 1980s drunk driving; don't drink and drive, children

I don’t even know why we went to war. Maybe someday someone else will reconstruct the series of events that led to all this, but that task is beyond me. I know what must have happened, because I know that the Soviets hit us first –

But to tell you about that, I have to tell you about the day of the war.

The war, when it finally came, was no real surprise. I had just been cleared to return to work on a trial basis, and I had told the members of my medical team that I was looking forward to returning. But in my heart I was suspicious.

I had a feeling that something terrible was going to happen.

The night before I was due to go back to work went smoothly, though not so smoothly as to concern me that something was afoot. I was anxious the whole day, pacing my apartment and double-checking that I had my clothes laid out for the morning. (Clothing had been a divisive issue to the team of doctors responsible for me – whether I could safely return to normal clothes, whether I should avoid certain fabrics. They eventually agreed that I was permitted to wear short-sleeved shirts, as long as the fabric didn’t irritate my stump.)

The last thing I did that night, after taking my nightly pain medication but before going to bed, was turn on the news for a little while.

I barely remember what it was like anymore, watching the news. The newscasters talked of frivolities, of the presidential election that was to come in the fall. A murder in Los Angeles. A dog that alerted its family to a house fire. I found it dull, and dozed off as if I was ever going to watch a newscast again. 

I don’t remember if I dreamed that night.

I do remember looking at myself in the mirror in the morning. Trying to decide whether I had changed while I was sick. I mean, besides the obvious, besides the missing hand, the scars on my face and remaining hand. I looked into my own face as if there would be answers there, and I thought –  _at least the weather is going to be nice today._

When you’re sick, you acquire a lot of baggage. It builds up without you noticing, until suddenly you’re carting around a lot more  _stuff_ than when you were healthy. I had gotten so used to my new normal that, getting ready for work, it shocked me when I realized how little  _stuff_ I had once required. There had been a time when I went places without my pills, without scar cream, without the little stress ball I used to exercise my right hand, where the scar tissue was doing its best to stiffen up and contract. There had been a time when I had just  _left_ in the morning with my wallet and car keys, because everything else I needed would be at the lab.

What I was starting to realize, even as I examined my face for signs of change, brushed my fingers over the pitted scars on my cheeks and nose, was that I was never going to be healthy again. I was always going to be like this, until I died. That’s a hard thing to think about yourself. That you’re on the wrong side of time, and something about you has changed forever.

But I still didn’t  _know_ that for sure. I was still trying to convince myself that I was never going to wake up and have my hand back, even though it went against the physical reality I felt every day, the pain and ghost sensations. As far as my brain was concerned, I still had a left hand. It was just invisible, intangible, caught in the space between this world and – somewhere else.

Recovery was an ongoing process, one I was only going through with because I believed that it had a future. One day I was going to get better. Things would be all right. I would stop feeling things that weren’t real, and everything would be all right.

I had plans for my future, back then. I don’t mean long-term plans for a house with a picket fence. I mean that I had made an appointment to be fitted for a prosthetic the next Tuesday. That I was dreading my next physical therapy session, at four o’clock that afternoon. That I was thinking of what I was going to say to my coworkers, how I could even begin to explain.

I’m sure you know that that’s the way it is when things end suddenly. You don’t know ahead of time. How could you? You go about your business like it’s any other day, and it’s only when you’re looking back that the little moments shine, that you realize how things used to be. And it hurts.

The wheel of time only ever turns forward, but you can see back along its curve. That’s the way I think of that morning – as a sequence of moments frozen in time, only special because of what came after. I only remember it by chance. A fluke of history.

I’m not sure what I would have done differently if I  _had_ known what was going to happen. Everything was already in motion. There was nothing I could do to change the slightest bit of what happened.

At least, not anything important. There was a lot I could have done differently, but it wouldn’t have changed anything that mattered.

I keep telling myself that, but I can’t make myself believe it.

I don’t even remember if I locked the door when I left that morning. Not that it matters now. But I’d feel better if I knew for sure, in a stupid way. Something I could hold on to. One last thing I could remember doing before the war.

My morning routine felt new that day, because it had been so long since the last time I’d gone to work. But you know how it is – when you drive a route often enough, it becomes part of your muscle memory and you stop recording the memories of driving it. You know, because you’re in a different place, that you must have driven it the same as you always do, but the last thing you remember is starting the car.

I still have my car keys. It’s the strangest thing. I had them in my pocket when the sirens started, and it never crossed my mind that they would be useless later, not until it was far too late to go back. They’re still on their little key-chain, this dyed faux fur thing that looks ridiculous, but that I can’t bring myself to get rid of.

Given that we were what you could call a “gray” site, the existence of our own Biopreparat unit was semi-public knowledge, in that the fact that a government lab devoted to infectious disease research was admitted to exist. The nature of our work was supposed to be classified, but... I’m sure you remember how it was, just before the war. We were seeing spies in every room, around every corner, listening in on every phone call. So the powers that were, paranoid as always, composed a suite of emergency plans for us in case of nuclear attack. These plans were accessible to us alongside those for more mundane events like fire, power outage, or, as I now had personal experience with, lab accidents resulting in viral release.

We even had drills; once a year, feeling a surreal nostalgia for our childhood fire drills, we practiced evacuating the building, or sheltering in place. Our private archives – located in sub-basement 1, by the way, should you find yourself in the area – were “hardened” to serve as fallout or earthquake shelters. They were dusty, unpleasantly dim places, and I had once been reassured by what I thought was the extreme unlikeliness of nuclear war. They were there  _in case_ , and I was faintly grateful for that.

I just, you know. Never thought I’d have to use them.

In the end, as it turned out, I didn’t. So that worked out, I guess.

Most of us in the lab only rarely visited the archives. The thing that occasionally put the unpleasant thought of war in my mind was the alarms. We had a very  _modern_ alarm system installed. Computer-controlled, hooked into the security terminals as well as alarm panels, it produced different alarm patterns for different detected emergencies. One blast, repeated every fifteen seconds, for a fire. A string of five short blasts, repeated every thirty seconds, for a lab accident.  _No_ blast for an earthquake – after the system triggered a few times a day for a week, security had quietly deactivated that sensor, figuring that the quake would be its own alarm. 

And if the sniffer server reported that the DEFCON (that’s DEFense readiness CONdition for you civilians) level had been raised to 2 or 1 – which mean, respectively, that nuclear war is considered highly likely, and that nuclear war is imminent – that was two blasts, about a second apart and each composed of two whoops, repeated constantly until deactivated by at least two security officers.

The last time I, and all of us, had heard  _that_ alarm was the last fire drill we’d held, the previous March, where they put the alarm system through its paces following a software update. The sound of the attack alarm had reminded me of something, but I couldn't quite tease it out. 

It fell out of my memory for a few months, until later that summer an old college friend of mine came to visit. His job had sent him out to California on a business trip, and he found himself in the area. We ended up, as we had so often in college, at a bar, and I asked him what he’d ended up doing for a living after graduating.

“Oh, I have a long title, but I won’t bore you with that. I investigate plane crashes. Try and figure out what happened.” He knocked back one of the tequila shots he’d ordered.

“I still don’t understand how you can drink that shit,” I said, as he chased it with a sip of his beer. “So, what, you listen to those black box recordings?”

“No,” he said. “We call them flight recorders. And I drink tequila shots for the same reason you’re drinking that whiskey. To get drunk.” He eyed me for a moment and added, in a softer tone, “And to try and forget some things.” 

I noticed that his hands were shaking. Not a lot. Just enough to be visible.

“It’s _bourbon,_ not whiskey,” I said. We’d been having _that_ argument since we met. I figured that doomsday would come before I ever got him over to the side of correctness. I guess I was right after all. “But you do listen to them?”

“Yep. And I’m the one who has to transcribe them.” He drained the rest of his beer in one long swallow and wrapped his hands around the mug. “So yeah. I do listen to them. A lot.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What kind of... What’s _on_ those tapes?”

“What do you think? Everything that gets said in the cockpit, every sound they make. Full tape lasts about half an hour, it progressively erases itself somehow. Unless the plane crashes.” He had been looking thoughtfully at his last shot while he said this, and he knocked it back before he continued. He was beginning to really sound drunk, and the tremor in his hands was worsening. “What do you think is on there? Because whatever you’re imagining, it’s worse.”

I pushed my glass away – it was mostly ice cubes with a few pools of liquor trapped between them. Just from the way his hands were shaking, I knew I was going to have to drive him back to his hotel. Which was not exactly the way I had planned to spend the evening. “You might be surprised. I have a good imagination.”

“Not that good, I hope.” He was playing with one of the empty shot glasses, picking it up and flipping it over and over in his hand. “Tell you what. If you can keep a secret, which I think you can. I’ve got the tape from my current one out in the car. You drive me back to that shitpot Holiday Inn, and we’ll listen to it on the way.”

He looked at me, and although his face was flushed from the alcohol, his eyes were steady and sane. Maybe a little  _too_ sane, you know. Being too much in tune with this fucked-up world is bad for the head. I knew that even then. 

“If you can handle it,” he added. 

That was a challenge I couldn’t resist, especially with a headful of whiskey warming me from the inside out. “You’re on,” I said.

My memory is full of holes now, maybe permanently, but I remember how I felt that night. Meeting my old drinking buddy, drinking like college kids – what adult drinks tequila shots? I felt like I was twenty again, like the whole world was mine for the taking, with Watergate still in the future and the buoyant tide of sixties optimism still bearing us up. Of course I could handle this tape. I could handle anything.

_Anything_ covers a lot of things, I’ve come to find. A whole lot.

We paid for our drinks and stumbled out to his car, a clean black rental sedan that reminded me of presidential motorcades on television. He unlocked the passenger door and tossed me the keys, and I just about dropped them in the gravel trying to catch them. I remember the plastic key-chain smacking into my left palm, and the cool metal of the key bouncing off my thumb. He slid into the passenger seat, and I into the driver’s seat. The car had a faint odor, just barely detectable, that reminded me of some memory I couldn’t quite recall.

I buckled my seatbelt and started the car, and he immediately hit the stop button on the radio before the tape could start playing. He hit the rewind button, and looked at me carefully.

“Are you _sure_ you want to hear it?” he said, and though his words were a little blurred, I heard a still seriousness in his voice. “These recordings stick with you.” 

I felt the drunkenness starting to leave me, like water down a drain, but I was still drunk enough to say, “Of course I’m sure.” I started to pull out of the parking lot, gravel popping under the tires.

“All right. You won’t hear the whole thing,” he said, as he pushed stop and then moved his finger to the play button. “Be thankful for that. We only have enough time to listen to about half of it.”

“Unless I take it with me,” I said, as I turned onto the main road. We were on the main drag in Ridgecrest, and neon signs were everywhere along the side of the road, their glow blotting out the stars so that the night sky looked infinitely dark and cold. 

“You can’t do that,” he said sharply. “I’d get fired. Hell, they might fire me if they found out about me letting you _hear_ it. This is just between us, you understand?”

“Yeah.” I was aware of my pulse beating in my throat. I cranked the window down a little to get some fresh air. The pleasant warmth of alcohol was trying to move into uncomfortable heat in my stomach. “I promise. Just between us.”

We were at a stoplight, and the red light cast a bloody glow over his face that disturbed me on a low, subconscious level. After a moment that seemed to last about a month, he said, “Here we go”, and pushed the play button.

It wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard, that tape. The sound was faint and scratchy, the voices a little blurred and talking jargon I didn’t understand back and forth. He talked over them in a low, dull voice.

“They were flying in a fog. This rich fuck and some of his rich fuck friends. Going fishing near Tahoe, I think. We found fishing poles in the wreckage. What was left of it. He flew into a patch of fog and thought he knew where he was going.” He played with the glove compartment as he talked, opening it an inch or so and shutting it, opening it and shutting it. His voice was toneless. Numb. 

“Turns out he forgot something. When they came out of the fog, they must have been some distance from the mountain, but not enough to do anything but plow right into it. We know that because they had a little while to talk into the recorder.” He paused. “Mostly they just screamed.”

He trailed off into silence after that, and turned up the volume a little bit, so I could hear every hiss and pop of the recording. They were just talking, in low voices almost obscured by the engine sounds. It was still jargon I didn’t understand. I assumed it was some sort of pilot talk. It washed over me like white noise – the voices of strangers, obscured by static.

“You’ll hear it in just a minute,” he said. Now he was popping his knuckles one by one. 

“Hear what?” I glanced over at him. We were about halfway to his hotel, and all of a sudden I felt exhausted. There had been a time in our lives when this sort of thing would have lasted all night – flitting from bar to bar looking for some kind of answer to the problem of being young. We weren’t twenty anymore, able to bounce back from a long night of drinking with ease. When you’re young you believe that time doesn’t effect you, but eventually you figure out that it can, and does. 

“The alarm.” I realized, with a little horror, that there were faint liver spots on the backs of his hands. It could’ve been a trick of the unsteady, fleeting light. “If you keep talking, you’ll miss it.”

I focused my attention on the radio as we cruised down the side street that led to his hotel. At this time of night it was nearly deserted, but not completely. I saw a faint dark figure standing in the pool of weak, orange light under a streetlight in the parking lot of an Arby’s that had closed for the night. We passed them by too quickly for me to see any other details, but I remember it perfectly, because for some irrational reason, maybe the drink, maybe the bitter nostalgia, maybe a premonition, I thought I had seen my own ghost.

The voices of the dead continued to issue from the radio, like whispers in the dark, smothered by the rattle of the airframe and the hiss of static. As I focused I began to hear something else in the background, a kind of beeping, whooping sound that sent a chill down my spine. And another voice – the computer repeating, over and over, “PULL UP. PULL UP.”

I remember that message clearly. The alarm would whoop twice in succession, then the voice would play. After that, brief silence before the message repeated. It was strange to hear a machine pleading with its human operators. Like something out of the vague science-fiction future I had imagined as a child.

The tape was winding to a finish as I pulled into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. On that particular night it was a lonely place – a few cars scattered across the vast-seeming asphalt parking lot, huddled in patches of dim light beneath streetlights. I drove as close to the front as I could get, rolling slowly, captivated by that tape.

“When they finally started paying attention, it was too late,” he said, startling me a little – we had fallen into a comfortable silence after he told me to listen for the alarm. Sure enough, one of the human voices broke through the static, followed by another voice. The machine continued to repeat in the background: PULL UP. PULL UP.

“What’s that?” said the first voice, reacting much too late to the automated alarm. 

“Oh my God,” said a different voice. 

“Maybe if we --”

“No, no, oh fuck, fuck --”

Then there was an enormous noise that I would have attributed to radio static if I hadn’t known this recording came from a crashed plane. I winced a little as I parked the car. He reached over and snapped the radio off.

“We think that first one was the pilot,” he said. “We found him kind of mashed into a corner in the cockpit. At first we thought he died from this piece of broken glass that was stuck in his throat. But they finally pulled him out, from under this chunk of one of the seats. Cut right in half.” He paused. “Well. Not cut. Crushed.”

I felt my stomach turn over just a bit. My hand went to the door handle. “Hey, man,” I said uneasily. “Let’s get you inside.”

“One of them ended up on the mountain,” he said. “By the time some hikers found him, the coyotes ate his eyes right out of his face. His lips too. It was like he was smiling at them. ‘Hi, nice to meet you. Have you seen my eyes anywhere?’” He laughed sickly. “I keep seeing his face when I close my eyes. And hearing that goddamn alarm. You’ll never forget it.”

Eventually I got him inside, walked him up to his room, told him it was nice seeing him. I went back down to the lobby to call a cab back to the bar – my car was still there – and while I waited for it to show up, it kept running through my mind.  _That goddamn alarm. You’ll never forget it._

As it turned out, he was right. Because when the sirens started to howl, on that cool mid-March morning, that alarm was the first thing I thought of. And I got this feeling in my stomach – I  _knew_ this wasn’t a drill or a false alarm. This was the real thing. We had, all of us, been in a fogbank for years now, and at last the mountain had loomed up out of it, when it was much too late to change our course.

The long dream of peace, of détente, was over.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ayyyy suffering time begins
> 
> notes:
> 
> 1\. this is version "alpha". a "beta" version exists and, when completed, will be posted over on the development blog. that version is tailored to function as a standalone piece, but contains no extra content per se. rest assured you are receiving premium Content
> 
> 2\. this came out real fuckin long so go grab a snack before you start reading

It was like when JFK was shot, that’s all I can compare it to in terms of magnitude. I remember exactly where I was when it happened. It is seared into my memory, even when so much else is melting away.

I was at my workstation using the computer, painfully entering, peck by peck, a progress report summarizing the work that had occurred while I was sick. I had stopped typing for a moment and was reaching into my little satchel of sick-person stuff for the stress ball I used. When the siren began to sound, it dropped right out of my hand, and, unconscious of that, I counted the whoops.

For what seemed like about an hour but was probably more in the area of thirty seconds, I stood there frozen, listening to the double-whoop repeating, trying to convince myself that I’d just miscounted. Then I heard the PA pop into life, and the voice of Security Chief Benson.

“All staff, report to your assigned evacuation point _immediately_. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill. The United States is under attack by a foreign power. Report to evacuation points immediately. And I do mean _immediately_.” The PA clicked off. 

Someone dropped a beaker, and I heard it shatter – for just a moment, there was an almost perfect stillness before people began to move.

Though I had had my paranoid, nervous suspicions, I was not exactly emotionally prepared for news of this kind. The pain medication I was taking already made me feel numb and disconnected from the world; this news just made it worse. Behind me I heard the laboratory technicians talking hurriedly to each other.

“...we have to go _now_ ,” said Jingyi. “Forget what you’re doing. You can finish it later.”

“There might not _be_ a ‘later’.” That was Margaret. She had been one of our last hires of 1987, and was still settling in. She lowered her voice a little, and I could hardly hear her over the repeating alarm. “And I’m worried about Dr. Porter. He seems so... out of it today.”

“He can take care of himself,” Jingyi said. “We need to get to the bunker before those missiles hit.” I saw her, reflected in the dark computer screen, raise her hand to stop Margaret from speaking. “I know. They’re targeted at China Lake. But if they miss, they might just hit us instead. And you don’t want to be outside a shelter if that happens.”

“I _remember_ the training seminar, Jingyi,” Margaret said sourly. “Fine. I’ll leave him to die. Let’s go.”

I heard their footsteps leaving the room. They were still talking as they went, but the alarm made it impossible to hear clearly. A kind of cold, distant clarity was descending over me, but I still didn’t know exactly what I should do. So I did what I had done before when answers eluded me. I went to see if Jim was in his office.

His office was just down the hall from my lab. The nameplate on his door said  _Doctor James Robertson_ , but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard someone call him that instead of Jim. I remember seeing that the brass was tarnished.

When I stepped inside it was like any other day. He was sitting at his desk, reading a report on something or other and taking notes. He looked up at me over his glasses, his eyes kind and mild as always. “Hello, Beau,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

I discovered, when I tried to speak, that I had suddenly lost all my words. There was a great black hole in my head that had absorbed my ability to use language. I forced out a couple words.

“Jim, I--”

That was as far as I got. He nodded and pushed his notes aside. “Yes,” he said. “It certainly is a shock.”

His eerie calmness only made it all feel less real. Like a vivid dream.

“Well,” he said, as I settled into the chair in front of him. “I guess we won’t have to worry about budget cuts anymore.”

I laughed – one of those laughs that feels more like a scream. My throat had gone tight and dry. “I guess not. Or anything else.”

“Right,” he agreed, his voice still level and pleasant. He leaned over, opened a drawer of his desk, and removed a bottle of Southern Comfort and two yellowed cocktail glasses that looked like they had been new when Nixon took office. He poured a couple fingers into each, looked me over, and poured a couple more into one of them before pushing it towards me. “Here. You look like you need it.”

I took it, in a hand that felt like it was going numb, and held it for a moment before knocking it back. Which was not, mind you, among my brightest ideas, but the burn of alcohol did distract me from the situation.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’d bet we have at least a few minutes before things really get exciting. Of course, that all depends on whether China Lake is a first-line target or a second-line target.” He took a sip from his own glass and added mildly, “If you ask me, I’d say they’re strictly a second-line target. That leaves us at least ten minutes to talk.”

“About what?” I rasped. I was trying to remember which station I was supposed to report to, but when I tried to visualize it, all I could see was the front door of my apartment. Which I was becoming certain I had forgotten to lock. Not that it mattered now.

“Well, you heard what Chief Benson said. We’re supposed to be reporting to our assigned stations. Most of us, anyway. I was just going to call you over, as it happens.”

“Most of us?” There was a little crack in my glass, and I began to rub my thumb over it. If nothing else, the little physical detail did reassure me that all this was actually happening.

“There’s a complication,” he said, and knocked back the remainder of his glass before pouring himself another. “ _You_ are supposed to report to your assigned station. _I_ have been ordered to do something else entirely. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Do you know what an emergency operating center is? Or continuity of government?”

I shook my head, and set my glass down on the table. Jim poured me another couple fingers of artificially-colored alcohol.

“We don’t have time for the full explanation,” he said. “The important part is that, not far from here, there is a bunker, to be occupied only in case of nuclear war. I’ve been assigned to it. But I’ve changed my mind. I’m resigning my position. And I want you to take my place.”

“Why?” 

“I find I don’t like the idea of being hidden away when the war comes. I want to see it for myself. Absurd, I know. But it means that all of our problems have suddenly become meaningless. It’s an end to things... for a little while.” He sighed. “No more Iran-Contra. No more Reagan. No more AIDS. All these things will be... swept away.” He waved his hand in the air, as if brushing away all the problems of life in 1988.

There was nothing I could really say to that.

“If I die, I die,” he said softly. “But I’ll die as a part of the world. I’ll die seeing it be changed forever. I don’t want to be hidden away, waiting to see what becomes of us. I want to see it happening, live and in person.”

“But you want me to go to this... bunker. Instead of you.”

“Yes. Well. The government wants you. I was their first choice for this particular role. Before you got sick, you were the second choice.” He paused for a moment. “And I think you deserve the chance to survive this.”

Everything felt perfectly clear and far away. Like it was all happening to someone else. And things felt predetermined. Looking back, he did railroad me into a choice. But the idea of guaranteed survival was an attractive one. Our building was designed to resist the trauma of a nearby nuclear detonation... but as I thought about it, I felt a doubt growing within me.

An ICBM is essentially a point-and-shoot weapon, but they’re not known for their accuracy. A missile aimed at China Lake might well hit us instead. And without being crass, while nuclear war has already been tried, it was conducted the old-fashioned way, with bombs dropped from an airplane. There was a lot of theorizing about what a war with ICBMs might look like, what effect it would have, but no way to know.

Unless it actually happened.

I wanted to live, I realized. I had come close to death in the hospital, and it wasn’t an experience I cared to repeat. My hands ached, both the flesh one and the ghostly phantom limb. I wanted to live. And I wanted to see what the world would look like after the war.

“There’s no way to know how things will turn out,” Jim said. “It’s possible there will be nuclear winter, and you’ll end up envying the dead. But it’s also possible that, while things will change a great deal, life will be worth living. That’s the chance I want to give you. I find I don’t want it anymore.” 

“I’ll do it,” I said. I felt like I was just going through the motions. Like at some point after I woke up this morning, the world had become nothing but a poorly-made television program. That none of this was really happening. Jim’s eerie calmness in the face of it all did not exactly help this perception.

“Good,” he said. “I thought I’d have to force you into it.”

“Force me?” It seemed I had lost the capacity to articulate thoughts of my own. I could only echo.

“Yes.” He smiled. “I was going to figure that part out when I came to it, but if I don’t have to, things are much easier.” He fumbled in the pocket of his jacket, and brought out a drab little white keycard. I put my hand out and took it from him. It was perfectly white on both sides – perfectly yellowing, I should say, since it was obviously cheap plastic. The US government will never pass up a chance to take the lowest bidder. “There. That will get you into the bunker. Proof that you were supposed to be assigned there.”

“Why would you want to stay here?” I said. 

He spread his hands out on the desk, almost caressing the scarred wood. “There are a number of things you can do when faced with a choice. You can decide to do it, you can decide to not do it... or you can decide not to decide. I decided to stay here. To not take the chance.” Over his shoulder, I saw the painting he had had hanging there since time immemorial, or approximately 1979, whichever you prefer. The desert, somewhere not far from here, peaceful and undisturbed.

“My whole life is here, Beau. Almost twenty years of it I spent sitting behind this desk, working in these labs. That was the world I committed myself to. There are two things I’ve really loved in my life. One is in Germany, and I think he will be safe from all of this. But one of them is here. This place. I gave up a lot to be here, and I have found that I don’t want to leave it.” I saw tears standing in his eyes. 

“A long time ago, I saw something in you. Despite all you’ve been through, I believe it is still there. After the war, things will be very different for those who survive. I think you have a fighting chance to change that world. To make it a better place than this one. That’s why I want to stay. I’m getting old. There isn’t much of a future for me either here or there. You still have years to live.”

He took a deep breath. “I’ve been waiting to tell you all that for a long time,” he said. “But I suppose there’s no time like the present. You’re too young for it, but when I was a boy my family lived near the Nevada Testing Site. I remember watching the nuclear tests. How beautiful they were. That kind of destructive power, in the hands of man. If I’m lucky, I’ll see it one last time before everything comes to an end.” He stroked the bottle of Southern Comfort. “If not, I’ll see this old world out with a toast while you get ready to build the new one.”

Even feeling numb and disconnected as I was, this change in Jim’s personality scared me. No matter what was happening, he made a point of keeping a calm, gentle exterior, a shield against the world. This long burst of words indicated a crack in that shield.

I sat, and I looked at him across the desk, and I thought  _All of this is coming to an end. I will never be here again_ . Everything I saw seemed prematurely old, seemed to be becoming historical relics ahead of time. Even Jim.

“They should be here any moment,” he said. “Your escort. To take you out there in the desert.” Even as he was speaking, I heard footsteps approaching us. 

“I’m sorry there isn’t more time,” he said. He put one hand out, and I took it in my remaining hand, and he just held it for a moment. “Consider this goodbye. All I ask is that you not be angry with me.”

“I’ll miss you,” I said stiffly. I looked down, and found that the little bag of sick-stuff I took with me just about everywhere had appeared in the chair with me. I must have grabbed it without really thinking. I saw how bright the little stress ball looked, how deeply red. 

“Yes,” he said. There was a knock at the open door, and I heard Chief Benson’s voice.

“Sir? Doctor Robertson, it’s time to go.” It felt like a thousand years since I had heard him giving the warning over the PA. 

“Hello Daryl,” Jim said pleasantly. “There’s been a change of plans. I’m not going. I’m resigning the position, effective immediately.”

“There’s no time,” said Benson. 

“You’ve forgotten something,” said Jim, his voice still pleasant and steady. “I have an understudy of sorts. _He_ ’ _s_ going to come with you. I intend to stay here and toast the end of the world.” He nodded to me. “Doctor Porter here is my emergency replacement. He’ll be happy to come along.” 

Benson was silent, and in that moment, Jim leaned over and took some small object from his briefcase. He set it casually on the desk, and I saw with horror that it was a gun.

“I’m not going,” he repeated. “Beau, I believe it’s come time for you to leave. Chief Benson will be happy to escort you.”

“Sir,” said Benson, and stopped. “Fine. Jensen,” he barked. “You escort Doctor Porter to the transport van. I’m going to do my best to talk some _sense_ into Doctor Robertson.”

A gloved hand touched my shoulder, and I stood up, dazed. I knew Officer Jensen. He worked the security station at the front desk. I wouldn’t call him a friend, but I knew him. He had scanned my keycard not an hour earlier.

“Time to go, Doctor,” he said, as if he had never seen me before in his life. “I see you’ve already got your things, so we’ll move right along.” He guided me out into the hallway. I had the eerie feeling he was reciting from a script. “The van is in the back parking lot. Everyone else is ready to go.”

“Everyone else?”

“No one you don’t already know,” he said cheerfully. “I’m sure you’ll get along very well.”

As we walked away, I heard Benson talking to Jim, trying to persuade him to leave, and Jim, calmly saying over and over that he would be staying right where he was. The words descended into background noise beneath the howl of the alarms. I wished that I had turned around as I left his office to get one more glimpse of his face. To remember him by.

We came to the door that led out into the back parking lot, all gravel and dying weeds and one dingy gray van parked with its engine running and the back doors open. The last thing I heard from the man I had considered my mentor and friend, the last thing I could convincingly associate with him, the last noise from inside as I stepped out into the warm March sunshine, was the gunshot.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> toot toot all aboard the angst train
> 
> there will probably be more gay shit in future chapters bc im a Big Homo
> 
> why is this six months late? see the end note
> 
> ps there is a Hidden Twist in here that sets up part of the rest of the plot

Everything seemed veiled over, as if some thin film separated me from the rest of the world. It was all perfectly distinct, but unimportant, like it was happening to someone else.

Jensen, thankfully, was quiet as he walked me to the van, his hand gently clamped on my shoulder. My left wrist throbbed with pain, somewhere out there in the fog, as if someone was prying it open like an oyster. It pulsed with every step I took. Looking down, I saw a half-finished cigarette, still oozing tendrils of smoke, smothered in the gravel.

“Here we are, Doctor,” Jensen said politely, and helped me into the back of the van. Seeing the two facing rows of bench seats, their cushions torn and threadbare, reminded me faintly of childhood church trips and family vacations. But the people sitting on them were my coworkers and friends.

I fell into the closest empty seat as Jensen shut the doors. The faces staring back at me were wholly unfamiliar, temporarily wiped from my memory. As I fumbled one-handed with the seatbelt, I heard Jensen’s boots crunching in the gravel as he walked around to the front of the van. I managed to slip the little metal tongue home just as the van jerked forward and the radio came alive with a pop of static that startled me before Jensen, or the unseen driver, turned it down.

My hand clamped down tightly on the leather of my little satchel, and without another hand to assist, I had to loosen my grip by force of will alone. I felt a little surprised to see the bag there, puddled in my lap like a dead thing. All my new life was caught up in that little bag. I pawed the stress ball out of the tangle and began to squeeze it, trying to work the scar tissue at the base of my right thumb, to loosen it a little or at least give myself something to do.

The faces were beginning to resolve and become familiar again. Marilyn Stone, her expression impassive as she flipped through a yellowing manual whose title I could not see, but whose format I knew instinctively. Almost any publication the government puts out has a particular format, a particular weight in the hand and ugly typesetting. And all their titles are too plain to stand. Too benign.  _DCPA Attack Environment Manual: What the Planner Needs to Know About the Post-Shelter Environment_ .  _Shelter Environmental Support Systems,_ volume 3.  _EMP Protection for Emergency Operating Centers_ .

It’s all just code for “How To Survive The End Of The World”, and all of it comes down to “be lucky, and have the right people be there”. The right people, according to some mysterious algorithm, some computer database or distant bureaucrat. The people here with me.

I saw them with a perfect, horrible clarity. Marilyn’s hair, falling black and sleek over one shoulder of her jacket, veiling the little turquoise brooch she wore on one lapel. The worn, crumpled look of the bench seats, and the faded pattern of their high-durability upholstery. Scars and dents on the metal of the walls.

Kyle was in the seat across from me. It felt like I hadn’t seen him in years, and every detail struck me with impossible weight. His hair, still winter-dark, tousled and parted on the left. A shaving cut on his right cheekbone, the line of scabby red stark against the fair skin.

I smelled cigarette smoke in the air. Marlboro Reds – Kyle’s brand since high school. I had a flash of vivid memory, passing a stale cigarette back and forth on some December morning in 1970 or thereabouts, standing on a hill looking down into town. I had just gotten my college acceptance letter, and in the summer I would be moving away from this town where we’d spent our whole lives. Frost on the grass, a low and humid chill in the air. The sun rising, throwing reflected light back to us from windows far away. He had stolen a kiss, a warm dry press of his lips on mine, before turning to walk back home, and I remembered the stale-smoke taste of his mouth, the way it seemed to linger on me all day.

Ever since the accident, I had felt more and more disconnected from the world around me. As if it were slowly ceasing to matter, as if I were drifting away from it to some other place. That feeling came and went, stronger some days than others, and that morning it was very strong. The things I saw around me were no longer the only possible truth – just one of many. The world had become a thing of no importance.

I’ve seen the maps. I know the road. Unless there’s ice or mud (unlikely), that drive from the back parking lot to – to the place where I am now – takes just a little less than fifteen minutes. Almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. No time at all. And yet that morning it felt both horribly compressed and infinitely elongated, as if it were going to last forever.

I heard Jim’s voice speaking, as real as if he were sitting next to me. He didn’t sound sad, or at all different from his usual mood, though he sounded distant and as if he had rehearsed his lines. I felt as if I could only turn my head and he’d be there.

“I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” he said, “for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying. Neither shall there be any more pain. For the former things are passed away.”

No one else heard him. Of course they didn’t. He wasn’t there.

I knew what he was saying – it’s been many years since Sunday school classes for me, but something in me knew Revelations for itself immediately. Probably one of the few books of the Bible that ever held my interest when I was younger. I could see no evidence of God around me, but as the stable world of my childhood crumbled under my feet, that strange dream of the end of all things resonated with me. Sometimes lines from it ran through my mind on the verge of sleep – _I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last_.

The sun was beginning to come out of the low cloud cover, and yet there was a strange shadow on the land, the low, slanting light gilding the scrub brush and gentle dunes of gravel. I saw a raven circling in the sky, a spot of black against the soft gray.

_I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore._

I think they were talking to me. Probably someone was. I remember their voices, but I don’t remember the words they said. It all seemed meaningless, drained of color and significance. Everything lifeless, like a museum diorama after the visitors have gone home. The radio hissed and murmured, the van bounced on its suspension as we went over ruts in the road, and none of it meant anything to me.

There’s a part of the mind, hidden away and mostly silent, that decides to believe or not believe in what’s going on around us. That’s the part that says _this can’t really be happening_ , the part that’s still an animal that only wants to curl up in its den and forget everything. It makes us feel calm and still when everything is falling apart, tells us that none of it really matters and things will be all right. It stands as a filter between us and the world, drains away the ability to feel. It says _just hide, hide and the bad thing will go away._

That morning, that part of me was stronger than any other. Like a fog that kept me from feeling the panic I knew I should be feeling, like a mass of cotton between me and the war that was coming. Kind of a shield, kind of a curse.

I don’t really remember much of that drive – after all, it was only fifteen minutes or so – but I remember that feeling of numbness. That perfect absence of fear that makes it so easy to just go through the motions and do as you’re told.

The world seemed to be receding away from me, unable to reach me. I remember Kyle putting his hand on mine, and only realizing then that we had stopped, that Jensen had opened the doors and was waiting for the two of us.

“Last stop. Everybody out.” He was wearing his sunglasses.

I scrambled awkwardly out, and as I was getting my feet under me, I heard the radio _stop._ Not like someone had turned it off. It went with a soft, staticky crunch, like the signal itself had vanished. Like something had happened to the transmitter.

“Oh hell,” said a disembodied voice – the driver, I guessed. “We’d better hurry up.”

I stood blinking in the sun, disoriented and suddenly tired, looking out into the desert. It didn’t look any different. The air was still night-time cool, the sagebrush rustling in a breeze I couldn’t feel. A coyote was nosing around the roots of a scrub oak, its head buried in the faint green of budding leaves. It didn’t care that we were here.

Kyle grabbed my shoulder, gently turned me around. I saw a concrete hall, projecting out of the sandy ground. No – a door, and a hall leading downward into the earth. A stairway. The door was open, and I saw Marilyn swiping a strange keycard while Jensen watched.

“That tells the system you’re all signed in,” he was saying. I could see in the faint sunlight that the card was a dirty, fading yellow. “Reporting for duty, I guess.”

She said something indistinct. Kyle fished in his pockets for a minute before drawing out his own keycard. Bracing my satchel against my left elbow, I scrabbled for the one Jim had given me. Had to be the right one. I trusted him.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Jensen said. “I guess you’re supposed to sign back out once you’re clear to leave, but that’s another kettle of fish. Who’s gonna be around to care, right?”

She laughed, and shook his hand before going through the door. Kyle was walking over, and I followed him, still in a fog. The breeze was picking up. I smelled dust, and sage, and the promise of hot weather.

“Welcome aboard, kid.” Jensen shook Kyle’s hand, and he walked away from me.

“Dr. Porter,” Jensen said politely, as I fumbled with the card twice before getting it right. Sweat prickled at the back of my neck. The green light flashed twice, and I managed to jam the card into my pocket without dropping it.

Jensen held his hand out, and I shook it, trembling. He had taken off his sunglasses, and he looked into my eyes as he spoke to me. I was the last one down, I guess. The one he saved his goodbye for.

“Good luck and God bless you, sir,” he said. His eyes were strangely calm. Behind him the sun came out from behind a cloud in a startling flare of light. “We’ll see you on the other side.”

My legs seemed to have gone numb, but I made myself move forward, towards those stairs that went down to an unknown place. I heard Jensen’s feet moving in the sand as I began to go down, and then the metallic slam of the door as it closed and locked behind me.

The cool, dry air fell over me like a shroud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sooooo my cat (ok not technically my cat but i doted on him) died in October and i have been ridiculously depressed since then. at the time this chapter was half-done, but i didn't crawl out of my sadness hole enough to even sort of finish it until tonight.
> 
> how depressed, you ask? i did not technically finish that semester, and have been marginally functional in basically every area. albeit at least im not constantly dissociating anymore.
> 
> OK ANYWAY 
> 
> it is _such a bitch_ to find and cite quotes months after tossing them in a draft, but here you go, im always a slut for Revelation. these are from the KJV because it is objectively the most bitchin' sounding translation:
> 
> Rev. 21:1 and 21:4: _"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. ...And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away."_
> 
> Rev. 22:13: _"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last."_
> 
> Rev. 1:18: _"I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death."_
> 
> next time: 80s gays! lots of angst! drama!


End file.
